There it was — an iconic image I had probably seen in history books or some newspaper. To be doubly sure, I confirmed it from the fellow behind the photo studio counter. It was a black and white image of two Sikh gentlemen, a strapping youth sitting on a rope cot, handcuffed and the other an elderly one, apparently in conversation. “Can I have a copy of that photograph?” I put in a request to the studio owner. “Yeah sure,” he was amused by my entreaty.
I displayed the framed picture in my living room right opposite my entrance door. An acquaintance noticed it and got a copy of it for herself. “He was a great freedom fighter. It’s sad that his name is now being used for petty politics,” bemoaned my son’s music teacher as he eyed the print. My dhobi’s son, a young boy my son’s age, had come to deliver the clothes. “Yeh kaun hain?” he asked, perhaps intrigued by the photograph of two sardars in a non-sikh household. “Bhagat Singh,” my 20-year old brat answered with a smile.
The revolutionary had been clicked in the Lahore jail in the snapshot. He, along with Batukeshwar Dutt, had courted arrest after bombing the Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi on April 8, 1929, taking a leaf out of Auguste Vaillant’s book. The duo, deeply inspired by the French anarchist’s ideology, wanted to exploit the court appearances as a ruse to publicise their cause and rouse public opinion in their favour.
An iconic image, though not as popular as the one of him in a hat with a pencil moustache often seen in police stations, offices of political parties (used in a bid to encash on his image) or in government offices behind those dust-laden files atop rusty bureaus.
In the latter picture, he had disguised as a sahib travelling with his family as he escaped with Durgawati Devi, wife of fellow revolutionary Bhagwati Charan Vohra and their child, with Shivaram Rajguru posing as their servant after having shot dead a police officer.
Assistant Superintendent of Police, Lahore John P Saunders had been assassinated on December 17, 1928 by Rajguru and Singh to avenge the death of Lala Lajpat Rai. The “Punjab Kesari” had succumbed to his injuries inflicted during lathi charge while leading a peaceful protest against the Simon Commission. Or another one, of the turbaned Singh in a pagdi with its one end adorning his shoulder, a la Rang De Basanti persona.
In the rare photograph clicked while he was incarcerated and awaiting trial, probably a few months before he walked to the gallows with searing clarity on March 23, 1931, the lanky lad barely in his 20s sat smiling, unflinching…stoic — yes, that’s the word the teacher told a bunch of eighth graders, that you remember when you talk of Bhagat Singh, I recalled as I travelled back in time to my school days. He sat unruffled like a flag on a still day.